piano-trio

The Three / Self-Titled (45 RPM)

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More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • Amazing sound throughout this Japanese import pressing, with both sides earning KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them
  • The transients are uncannily lifelike – listen for the powerful kinetic energy produced when Shelly whacks the hell out of his cymbals
  • My favorite Piano Trio Jazz Album of All Time; every one of the tracks is brilliantly arranged and performed
  • 4 stars: “One of Joe Sample’s finest sessions as a leader” – with Shelly Manne and Ray Brown, we would say it’s clearly his finest session, as a leader or simply as the piano player in a killer trio
  • Some of the other records we’ve discovered with Top Jazz Piano Sound can be found here
  • More Amazing Sounding Piano Recordings, of every kind of music, can be found here

If you want to hear the full six tunes recorded by The Three at that famous Hollywood session (which ran all day and long into the night, 4 AM to be exact), our 33 RPM pressings are your best bet.

If you want absolutely amazing, mind-blowing, you-are-there sound, a Hot Stamper 45 is the only way to go.

The music is so good that I personally would not want to live without the complete album. The Three is, in fact, my favorite Piano Trio Jazz Album of All Time; every one of those six tracks is brilliantly arranged and performed (if you have the right takes of course; more about that later).

This album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:

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The Three – Liner Notes and a Rave Review

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Three Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for The Three

Excerpts from the Liner Notes

On a windy and unusually cold night in Los Angeles, each of the three musicians arrived before the session start time of 10 PM on November 28, 1975. At exactly 10 PM, The Doobie Brothers session that was going on since morning ended. Two assistants immediately started setting up for the session. The Steinway concert grand piano, delivered the previous day, was wheeled in to the center of the room and got tuned. Shelly Manne’s drum kit was assembled in a makeshift “booth.” Microphones were set up, checked and positions adjusted.

Initially, Telefunken microphones were positioned on the piano, but later were replaced by two Neumann U87s. The piano lid was opened to the concert position and microphones were centered relative to the keys and placed a foot (30 centimeters) inward from the hammer and a foot (30 centimeters) away from the stings. One mic was pointed toward the bottom notes and the other pointed toward the top.

To record Ray Brown’s bass, a Shure SM56 and a Sony 38A were pointed at the bridge of the bass, two inches above it. The Shure was used to capture the attack and the Sony mic was used to capture the rich low tones.

Seven microphones were used to capture the sounds of the drum set. Two U87’s were placed overhead, roughly 16-inches above the cymbals facing down. The bottom quarter of the kick drum was dampened with a blanket on the outside and was mic’ed with a Shure SM56. SM56’s were also used for toms and bass toms. Sony 38A was used on the snare and Sennheiser’s Syncrhon on the high-hat.

Each mic was placed 2 inches away from the instruments in a close mic set up. Mr. Itoh got involved with fine tuning mic positioning for tone, stereo placement and balance. Meanwhile, final adjustments were being made on the cutting machine set up.

Within the hour, the set up was done and all preparations were completed. The musicians finished warming up and were ready for Take One. The usual banter subsided and everyone put on their “game face.” Even Ray Brown, who usually cracked jokes in a loud voice, looked serious as he turned his attention to Mr. Itoh, waiting for his cue. As soon as he was notified through the intercom that the cutting needle was put down, Mr. Itoh gave the signal with his hand, and the recording started. In 16 minutes, three tracks were recorded in rapid succession.

Relieved that the initial take was over, the musicians joined the producer and engineer in the control room to listen back from the 2-track tape that was used as back up. With the initial tension gone, all three excitedly made comments and evaluated their own performance and the sounds they got. The thumbs-up was given by the cutting engineer for take one and the musicians went back to the live room for the next take. This process was repeated until 4 AM the following morning, resulting in a total of three takes per track.

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Hampton Hawes at the Piano – His Best Album

More of the Music of Hampton Hawes

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Label Jazz Albums in Stock

This Contemporary Yellow Label LP has THE BEST SOUND and THE BEST MUSIC I have EVER heard on a Hampton Hawes album! When we dropped the needle on this one we could not believe our ears — it’s got The Big Sound, that’s for sure.

The piano has real weight, the bass is deep and tight, and the drums sound correct. The overall sound is rich, sweet, and tonally correct from top to bottom. It’s incredibly open and transparent — you hear tons of ambience.

If you’re a fan of jazz piano trios playing live-in-the-studio, this Contemporary from 1958 surely deserves a place in your collection. Of course it’s a Personal Favorite of yours truly.

This is my favorite Hampton Hawes record of all time. He died less than a year after these sessions. Looking at the cover, you can almost see in his face his acceptance of the end he knew was coming. He plays with deep emotion here.

Ray Brown and Shelly Manne, the same rhythm section who back Joe Sample on my all-time favorite piano trio album, The Three, accompany Hawes beautifully here.

As good as The Three may be, it is not remotely as natural sounding as this Contemporary recording by Roy DuNann. Due to the multi-miking approach Lee Herschberg took for the session, Shelly Manne’s drums on The Three stretch from speaker to speaker, presenting us with a drummer whose arms are impossibly long. On this Contemporary recording the drummer is placed in the soundfield in one fixed location and his drum kit is the size of a standard jazz kit of the ’50s. I’m good with either approach, but there’s no question which one is more natural.

Drop the needle on “Blue In Green” on side two — the sound of the bowed bass is WONDERFUL. The version of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” that opens the album is especially lovely. (One high point of this album is the interview that Lester Koenig conducts with Hampton Hawes on the back cover. Lester died soon thereafter himself.)

We consider this final album from Hampton Hawes to be a Masterpiece. It’s a recording that belongs in any serious Jazz Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

Further Reading

Andre Previn – These Two OJC Pressings Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Piano Jazz Albums Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings on Contemporary Available Now

The mastering choices of the cutting engineers for these two recordings did them no favors.

Like so many of the early OJC pressings we’ve played over the years, we found that both of these reissues tended to be somewhat thin tonally, with a brittle top end, which can clearly be heard in the tizzy quality of the cymbals.

This is not remotely the right sound for a vintage Contemporary recording.

When doing the shootouts for these albums, warmth turned out to be key to the sound of the best copies.

When the piano sounds warm and smooth, everything else in the recording seems to fall into place.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.

We routinely play them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

Further Reading

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio / Midnight Sugar on Two 45 RPM Discs

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

More Commentaries and Reviews for Jazz Piano Recordings

Sonic Grade: B

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds.

The following notes were added in 2023. The original review can be seen just below them.

We should point out that the original Japanese pressings are clearly better sounding than any of the Super-Cut Analogue Disks that were pressed at RTI, regardless of the cutting speed.

I remember auditioning the 33 RPM recut that had been done in 1995. I was a big fan of the album in those days, and I had at least one and maybe more than one authentic Japanese pressings of the album in my collection. I still own the Three Blind Mice CDs of a number of titles as well.

It was no contest, the early pressings were obviously better in every way. I was selling heavy vinyl back then, and that’s what I had to sell, so I raved about the sound of the RTI-pressed reissues and sold plenty of them. I never bothered to point out that they were not as good as the originals. They were good and that was pretty much all I was going to say about them.

The authentic Japanese pressings were expensive to buy and very hard to find. Although they were better sounding, anyone buying the new pressings was likely to be happy with them, and that was good enough for the business model of Better Records at the time.

What accounts for the fall-off in sound quality from the earlier pressings to the reissues, remastered in Japan and then pressed at RTI, is anyone’s guess.

Some of that reduction results from the substandard sound that virtually all RTI pressings tend to have, a subject we discussed in some detail in this commentary from years back.

As you may have read, we stopped selling new Heavy Vinyl titles in 2007, eliminating the temptation to say nice things about records that are in print and reasonably priced, but not really as good as they should be.

Our commentary for Blue gets at all these issues. The Rhino pressing is a good record, but not nearly as good as it should be, and hopelessly outclassed by the good original pressings, the ones cut by the formerly excellent engineer, Bernie Grundman.

We made the decision then and there to simply raise our standards, and that meant the end of us offering Heavy Vinyl pressings to our customers.

We like to sell records that are amazing sounding, not records that can easily be beaten by other pressings you may happen to have already, or probably could manage to acquire on your own.

Our White Hot Stamper section is the place to go if you are looking for records that are dramatically better sounding than any pressings you could hope to find on your own. They are guaranteed to blow your mind, or your money back.

Our Original Review from Circa 2004

This 45 RPM Three Blind Mice 180g Double LP has DEMO DISC SOUND! The 33 RPM versions were pretty darn amazing but these 45s take the sound of this recording to an entirely new level. 

There are a couple of quite obvious benefits to mastering this music at 45 RPM. One is that Yamamoto tends to use his right hand in a percussive manner, which creates tracking problems on most any set up. At 45 RPM the mastering engineer is able to cut those transients, full of difficult to deal with harmonics, much more cleanly and accurately. The result is a sense of “ease” that you don’t hear on the 33.

It’s a bit like having a slightly underpowered system which makes loud passages or transients seem to be right at the edge of distortion, and then switching to a more powerful amplifier and hearing those passages reproduced with the relaxed quality that more headroom gives you.

Also the sound opens up quite a bit on these 45s so that more of the room ambience is heard. The Japanese are famous for their close-miking, and sometimes the sense of real musicians in a real space is lacking. Here much of that quality is restored.

Yamamoto is one of the few Japanese jazz players who has any feel for the medium. If you like bluesy jazz piano with amazingly dynamic sound, you can’t go wrong here. 

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Hampton Hawes – All Night Session, Vol. 2

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More Jazz Recordings on Contemporary

  • These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have jazz quartet energy to rival the best recordings you may have heard
  • Tubey Magic, richness, sweetness, dead-on timbres from top to bottom – this is a textbook example of Contemporary sound at its best, thanks to the engineering brilliance of Roy DuNann and producer Lester Koenig
  • The second of three albums of material recorded by Hawes, guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Red Mitchell, and drummer Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman on the night of November 12 and into the morning of November 13, 1956
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Although Hampton Hawes spontaneously created five original tunes at this extraordinarily inspired date, everything on Vol. 2 comes directly out of the standard bop musician’s working repertoire.”
  • “It’s hard to put into words how good it feels to play jazz when it’s really swinging…I’ve reached a point where the music fills you up so much emotionally that you feel like shouting hallelujah — like people do in church when they’re converted to God. That’s the way I was feeling the night we recorded All Night Session!” – Hampton Hawes
  • If you’re a fan of jazz piano trios playing live-in-the-studio, this Contemporary from 1958 surely deserves a place in your collection.

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Shelly Manne & His Friends – Bells Are Ringing

Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Contemporary Jazz

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this outstanding Black Label original on vinyl that’s about as quiet as they ever play
  • The piano sounds lifelike right from the start, a beautiful instrument in a natural space, tonally correct from top to bottom
  • This copy makes it clear that this is a Demo Disc Quality Recording for Contemporary, and that’s saying a lot
  • It’s also our favorite jazz piano performance by Andre Previn on record
  • Only a handful of copies of this title have made it on the site in the last few years – finding them in audiophile condition is getting harder (and more expensive) than ever these days
  • “Previn’s piano is the lead voice and his virtuosity, good taste, melodic improvising, and solid sense of swing are chiefly responsible for the music’s success.”

I have a very long history with this album, going back decades. My friend Robert Pincus first turned me on to the CD, which, happily for all concerned, was mastered beautifully. We used it to test and tweak all the stereos in my friends’ systems.

Playing the original stereo record, which I assumed must never have been reissued due to its rarity (I have since learned otherwise), all I could hear on my ’90s all tube system was blurred mids, lack of transient attack, sloppy bass, lack of space and transparency, and other shortcomings too numerous to mention that I simply attributed at the time to vintage jazz vinyl.

Well, things have certainly changed. I have virtually none of the equipment I had back then, and I hear none of the problems with this copy that I heard back then on pressing I owned. This is clearly a different LP (I sold off the old one years ago) but I have to think that much of the change in the sound was a change in cleaning, equipment, tweaks and room treatments, all the stuff we prattle on about endlessly on the site.

In other words, if you have a highly-resolving modern system and a good room, you should be knocked out by the sound of this record. I sure was.

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Count Basie / Kansas City 3 – For The Second Time

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More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • A KILLER piano trio recording with superb sound on both sides of this original Pablo LP
  • It’s bigger, richer, more Tubey Magical, and has more extension on both ends of the spectrum than most other copies we played
  • A different, more compact sound for Basie, joined here as he is by two of the most sympathetic sidemen in jazz: Ray Brown on bass and Louis Bellson on drums
  • “[T]he main joy of this set is hearing Basie stretch out on such numbers as ‘If I Could Be with You,’ ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ and ‘The One I Love,’ tunes he did not play much with his orchestra in this later period.”
  • Steer clear of the OJC of this title – it’s thin and opaque, the opposite of the sound you want

It’s a joy to hear Basie perform as a frontman, stretching out on tunes that were no doubt dear to him. Veterans of hundreds of sessions, Ray Brown and Louis Bellson are just as interesting as Basie, high praise.

Recorded by the legendary engineer Ed Greene (Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd – Jazz Samba) — that accounts for the exceptional sound.

Naturally we pick up all the Pablo Basie titles we can get our hands on these days, having had very good luck with a great many of them. When we dropped the needle on a copy of this one a few years back we were amazed at the sound. My post-it, still on the record, reads “SUPERB DEMO DISC.” It certainly is.

This album was part of a series of smaller ensemble recordings under the heading of Kansas City that Pablo undertook with Basie later in his career. Basie had recorded a piano trio record with the same gents the year before For the First Time and must have enjoyed himself enough to give it another go.

The best copies are big and rich, and present you with a solid, weight, clear piano like few piano trio recordings you have ever heard.

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Hampton Hawes – Vol 2: The Trio

More Hampton Hawes

More Contemporary Label Jazz Recordings

This Triple Plus (+++) pressing from ’55/’56 mono tapes is EVERYTHING that’s good about mono. The size, the weight, the solidity, the clarity, the energy, the rhythmic drive – it’s all here and more.

This killer pressing has the best sound and the best music we have ever heard on any Hampton Hawes album.

There is nothing to fault in the sound of side one of this pressing, and side two was nearly as good – what a record!

Both sides are Tubey Magical, rich, open, spacious and tonally correct. We’ve never heard the record sound better, and that’s coming from someone who’s been playing the album since the ’80s.

These guys are playing live in the studio and you can really feel their presence on every track — assuming you have a copy that sounds like this one.

Based on what I’m hearing my feeling is that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the master tape, and that all that was needed to transfer that vintage sound correctly onto vinyl disc was simply to thread up the tape on a high quality machine and hit play.

The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record these days — certainly not as good sounding as this one — tells me that in fact I’m wrong to think that such an approach would work. Somebody should have been able to figure out how to do it by now. In our experience that is simply not the case today, and has not been for many years, if not decades.

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Robert Brook Digs Deep and “Gets” Down to Earth

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he has written for a record we had very much enjoyed while doing the shootout for it a few years back, Down to Earth.

DIGGING DEEP Into The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s DOWN TO EARTH

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are exceptionally good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

(more…)